Earthquakes!

Mike O'Meara believes the Earth is crumbling as we speak, due  to all the earthquakes (and now volcano).

I decided to see what the USGS had to say. They have publicly available databases, so I plotted the amount of earthquakes greater than 5.0 on the Richter scale by year:

As you can see, 2007 had the most earthquakes since the beginning of the available USGS data. However, since this year is only one-third over, I multiplied this year's earthquakes by 3, producing the Projected result: more earthquakes than ever! This works on the assumption that earthquakes in the rest of the year are as often as they were in the first third.

But are they getting more severe?

Here, we have the magnitude of the earthquakes over 5.0 from 1973 to 2010. I made a rolling average to smooth out the data a little. It doesn't seem like the earthquakes are getting worse over time, fortunately.

So there's my cursory scientific analysis of earthquakes: we may have more this year, but they're not getting worse.